This is the Blog of Will Weider. This is the place where I share what I have learned through my mistakes and other crazy things in the life of a healthcare CIO.

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Hard-to-find CPOE Data

I couldn’t seem to get my hands on good numbers regarding Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE). So, I have decided to do my own research. These numbers are based upon the Leapfrog Group survey reported on their web site.

You may ask “but Will, what if there are hospitals that have implemented CPOE but have not reported it to the Leapfrog Group?” I cannot imagine that someone would go through the effort of a CPOE implementation and not report their success to the Leapfrog Group. At many hospitals “Leapfrog” is the reason to do CPOE.

Is it possible that a lot of hospitals have gone live on CPOE since that last survey submission deadline? After all, each large HIS vendor claims they have hundreds of hospitals implementing CPOE. Well, it is possible that some new CPOE installations have recently gone live but, according to the Leapfrog site, only 58 hospitals claimed they were within 12 months of bringing their CPOE system live.

The other cautionary note is that all of the Leapfrog Group surveys are self-reported. I am going to write a separate post on why I am skeptical about many of these self-reported surveys.So, how many hospitals claim they have implemented CPOE, as defined by Leapfrog?

68 hospitals operated by 43 different health systems claim to have fully met the CPOE leap. This represents 1.7% of all hospitals in the US according to my database.

Here is a breakdown by Type:

Academic Medical Center: 30

Community Hospitals: 26

Government Owned Facilities: 6

Children’s Hospitals: 5

Heart Hospital: 1

This means that only .08% of American community hospitals have implemented CPOE (according to my database). But, I would be the first to admit that the definition of a “community hospital” is open to interpretation. I think this is a more important number, because Academic Medical Cetners can rely on residents to enter orders online without much regard to their desires. Community hospitals risk losing their top admitters to the competition.

I also think it is interesting to look at these hospitals by bed size (staffed beds):

101 – 249 beds: 14

251 – 400 beds: 14

>400 beds: 34

The fact that most of the hospitals are big is no surprise. The real eye opener is the 6 that are under 100 beds. Again, I will write about this in a future post (we will have some fun with that).

I also plan to run the numbers by software vendor in a future post.

I hope this is helpful. I think the numbers can help set some expectations.

Hi Will, Andy Smith pointed me to your blog and I am enjoying it. KLAS gave a great update to us yesterday on the CPOE numbers, if you’re interested I can send you the presentation and audio file. We had over 100 people sign up for this teleconference, clearly an indication of the importance of the topic and confusion about the actual facts as you point out.